Night by Elie Wiesel

In class today, we read an excerpt from Night by Elie Wiesel. This bleak story about the suffering that the Jews went through on the long train ride to Auschwitz, a concentration camp in Poland. We do not know who the narrator is, but he or she was very annoyed with a woman named Mrs. Schächter. The other people on the train were aggravated as well, and everyone thought that she was hallucinating. Some of the passengers even hit her, and "gagged" her. She claimed to be seeing huge flames somewhere in the distance. Why is it that she was the only one who could see the fire?

After many, many days of very little food and intolerable heat in a cramped setting, the Jews were finally let off of the train. They had arrived Auschwitz II - Birkenau, the extermination camp. Mrs. Schächter was right, there were massive flames coming out from the top of a tall chimney. The bright glow of the orange flames were in high contrast with the darkness of the night sky. "In front of us, those flames. In the air, the smell of burning flesh." We can infer from the text that the Jews were going to be burned in the fire. And although everyone thought that Mrs. Schächter was mentally ill (and she was), at least she gave them a bit of a "heads up". Was Mrs. Schächter able to see the future? How could she tell that they were going to be killed in the fire? And why didn't anyone else believe her? There are so many questions left unanswered from this excerpt.